Last week Google purchased a stake in Baidu, one of the most popular search engines in China.

Baidu claims to have the planet's largest index of Chinese-language web pages, totalling more than 300 million pages.

This gives Google a foothold in China's exploding internet market, and allows it to better compete against Yahoo, which last November acquired 3721.com, a leading Chinese search engine.

Not to be outdone, eBay just announced the acquisition of Baazee.com, operator of India's largest online auction site.

India remains a relatively small internet market, with an estimated 17 million internet users.

China has 84 million and the U.S. 188 million internet users.

All that is meaningless, when you consider the future: remember that India's population is 1.05 billion, while China's is 1.29 billion.

The U.S. has 290 million people.

You can see the American market is pretty well saturated, whereas the two countries that will rule the planet by 2030 - India and China - have almost limitless potential.

I say again, learn Chinese and guarantee your future.